Mr. Irrelevanthttp://misterirrelevant.com
The No. 1 source of Skins, Nats, Caps and Wiz coverage from the brothers Mottram.Fri, 07 Sep 2018 18:29:56 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.4Welcome To Season 2 Of The Mr. Irrelevant Podcasthttp://misterirrelevant.com/welcome-to-season-2-of-the-mr-irrelevant-podcast/
http://misterirrelevant.com/welcome-to-season-2-of-the-mr-irrelevant-podcast/#commentsFri, 07 Sep 2018 15:25:22 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39397After months alone in the wilderness, apart from my partner Matt Terl, we’re back in the saddle, Posse-style, for Season 2 of the Mr. Irrelevant podcast.

The first two episodes aired (aired?) already, and we hope to do a new one each week through the NFL season with a focus on the Skins and probable sidebars about nanobreweries, parenting and ’90s soundtracks.

If you care to listen and/or subscribe, that’d be great. Here’s where you can do that:

The Washington Capitals are no stranger to the Stanley Cup Playoffs. But qualifying and making a run are two different things — and the Caps haven’t advanced past the second round since 1997-98, when they advanced to the Stanley Cup and lost to Detroit. All those early exits appear to have bred some apathy among Washington fans, as evidenced by the low prices for playoff tickets on the secondary market.

According to secondary market vendor TicketIQ.com, the average asking price for a ticket on the secondary market for the Caps opening-round series against the Columbus Blue Jackets on Thursday is $203 — the cheapest it’s been in a decade. That number, while low, isn’t the lowest across the NHL. The cheapest first-round series ticket is $161 to see the San Jose Sharks host the Anaheim Ducks in Game 3 next week, followed by the Los Angeles Kings hosting the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 3 Sunday ($172). The most expensive ticket is $652 to see the Toronto Maple Leafs host the Boston Bruins.

Despite the low asking price for first-round tickets, there are certainly those out there who believe the Caps have a great chance at making it to the Stanley Cup Finals. On ShooWin.com, a secondary market vendor that allows fans to pre-buy or make reservations in the hopes their team will advance, the current price to reserve tickets to see the Capitals in the Stanley Cup Finals is $200 — less than the current asking price on the secondary market for a first-round game.

That price is the highest listed on ShooWin.com, and seven of the 16 post-season qualifiers are currently commanding that price, including the Nashville Predators, who are widely favored to win it all. The other teams with a $200-reservation price are Boston, Tampa Bay, Toronto, Vegas and Winnepeg.

OddsShark.com gives every one of those teams — except Toronto — better odds at winning the Stanley Cup. The Maple Leafs and Capitals are both currently at +1200. Comparatively, the Predators, who lost in the Stanley Cup Finals last year, are favored at +350.

While low first-round prices may be a reflection of fans’ skepticism, those low expectations could work in the Capitals’ favor, taking the pressure off. Whatever the scenario, first-round tickets are a great deal for Capitals fans. The current asking price represents a 35 percent drop against last year, when it cost fans an average of $313 on the secondary market to the Caps play in the opening round.

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/caps-playoff-ticket-prices-hit-decade-long-low/feed/0Mr. I Pod Presents: Our Top 10 Soundtracks Of The 1990shttp://misterirrelevant.com/mr-i-pod-presents-our-top-10-soundtracks-of-the-1990s/
http://misterirrelevant.com/mr-i-pod-presents-our-top-10-soundtracks-of-the-1990s/#commentsSat, 17 Feb 2018 14:18:15 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39341The Mr. Irrelevant Podcast (available on iTunes!) is usually about D.C. sports (read: the Redskins), but it’s taken a turn the past two episodes.

Last week it was about Matt Terl’s Disney Cruise (listen), and this week we spend an hour drafting our 10 favorite movie soundtracks of the 1990s. Listen below, or you can see the results here.

The way it works is we do a five-round draft, with Matt picking first then me second. The parameters, because this is important, are as follows: A) We’re basing this on how much we loved them then and not now, and B) It doesn’t matter if the music was from the ’90s, so long as the movie was.

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/mr-i-pod-presents-our-top-10-soundtracks-of-the-1990s/feed/4Woke Dan Snyder Lurches Ever Closer To Realityhttp://misterirrelevant.com/woke-dan-snyder-lurches-ever-closer-to-reality/
http://misterirrelevant.com/woke-dan-snyder-lurches-ever-closer-to-reality/#respondFri, 20 Oct 2017 18:12:55 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39290Last year, when it seemed at least possible that November would mark the end of Donald Trump’s particular brand of American madness rather than its true launching pad, I talked to cultural critic Chuck Klosterman about the local NFL team’s name for a column over at Washington City Paper.

Klosterman was doing the rounds in support of his then-new book But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About The Present As If It Were The Past. The thesis of the book (very crudely summarized) is that we tend to think of the past as a time when people held ridiculous ideas that look stupid in hindsight, and of the present as a time of more enlightened, scientific thinking.

Klosterman’s approach is to consider the possibility that our current ideas (about science, about culture, about everything) will look just as preposterous to a future audience as Aristotle’s belief that rocks don’t float because they want to be closer to the Earth looks to us now, and I thought the neverending name controversy would be an interesting topic to look at through that lens. So the meat of the column (and the bulk of the interview) basically consisted of us spitballing various possible outcomes to the name controversy, from the ridiculous-sounding to the incrementally less-ridiculous-sounding.

By the nature of Klosterman’s thesis, anything that didn’t sound sufficiently ridiculous had to be discarded as unlikely to occur, so we were really trying to stretch credulity; perhaps the best example of this was the idea of “woke Dan Snyder” becoming socially aware and changing the name himself.

In discussing the idea that one way the team name might persist is if football becomes a niche sport (because of concussions or violence or general cultural disapproval), Klosterman suggested that if “Football survives because of its violence and it takes on a political meaning that suggests a certain kind of ideology about life,” then it was possible to see “this idea of the Redskin name being part of tradition becomes a stronger argument, at least to the people in that group, in that they’re saying that football is the way to kind of tie back into a world that has changed, and whatever that world was is what we want to perpetuate.”

That is, if football becomes a niche sport, the team name would stick around because the sort of people who still liked the violence and suddenness of the sport would also want to maintain a team name that some groups in the past had found offensive.

If you abstract further–or read more deeply between the lines–it seems clear that what’s being said is “If football sticks around as a niche sport in the future, it’s popularity will be with the kind of demographic that likes violence and thinks only snowflakes care about hurt feelings.” The corollary assumption, of course, is that high-minded liberal elites would’ve moved on to basketball or curling or parkour or whatever, leaving football to those masses without a backward look.

Somehow, neither of us realized that this was exactly the kind of obvious, linear-narrative assumption that Klosterman’s own thesis told us to avoid.

“Everybody understands that we’re going to get baited, whether it’s from the President or whether it’s from other detractors. We need to be above petty attacks from anybody, because racial and socioeconomic inequality has existed in this country for too long. We need to get the focus on that, and we need to make sure that we make progress there.”

That is an NFL owner–not a cohort that’s notoriously concerned with social causes–openly taking sides in support of his protesting players, and against the nationalist, #MAGA, theoretically-white-American-mainstream view. The owners taking that position means that, if any group seems likely to make the reactionary move and abandon football fandom, it’s not going to be the socially liberal crowd. Which further means that we may very well be approaching the point where the NFL becomes the de facto thinking fan’s sport, and the idea of people “saying that football is the way to kind of tie back into a world that has changed,” as Klosterman put it, will be the exact opposite of the ones we originally expected.

And it didn’t take us three hundred years to get to this point, or thirty or even three. It took sixteen months. Maybe woke Dan Snyder wasn’t such a far-fetched idea at all. (NOTE: No, that idea is still completely preposterous.)

(Photo by Keith Allison, used under Creative Commons license.)

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/woke-dan-snyder-lurches-ever-closer-to-reality/feed/0Redskins-Rams Week 2 Overreactionshttp://misterirrelevant.com/redskins-rams-week-2-overreactions-podcast-matt-terl-jamie-mottram/
http://misterirrelevant.com/redskins-rams-week-2-overreactions-podcast-matt-terl-jamie-mottram/#respondMon, 18 Sep 2017 02:47:03 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39267Here’s this week’s edition of Overreactions with Matt and Jamie. The show is a little more enjoyable and therapeutic when we lose, but I’ll take the win.

Each Sunday night/Monday morning Matt Terl and I will be podcasting about the Skins game du jour, running through the offensive, defensive, special teams, coaching, officiating and broadcasting performances. We hope you don’t hate it too much.

Here’s the first take, following the abomination that was the Redskins’ 30-17 Week 1 loss to Philly. Enjoy!

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/redskins-eagles-postgame-podcast-matt-terl-dean-blandino/feed/0Nats Park Beer Pod With Matt Terlhttp://misterirrelevant.com/nationals-park-craft-beer-matt-terl-podcast/
http://misterirrelevant.com/nationals-park-craft-beer-matt-terl-podcast/#commentsTue, 29 Aug 2017 13:06:18 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39252Our old soul brother Matt Terl recently wrote about the beer offerings at Nats Park, and we like all of the things mentioned in the first part of this sentence, so we did a pod about it.

Tune in down below, but before you do, check out Mottram brother Beef’s unofficial NoVa brewery rankings. He’s a 30-year-old white man living in Leesburg, so he’s a bit of an expert:

1. Aslin
2. Vanish
3. Crooked Run
4. Adroit Theory
5. Ocelot

PS: Apparently Aslin is pronounced Az-lin and not Ass-lin, as I was saying it on the pod. My apologies to doughy bearded guys everywhere.

PPS: Thanks to The Nationals Review for the beer map pictured above. Be sure to visit their Nats Park Beer Guide if you’re at all interested in this subject.

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/nationals-park-craft-beer-matt-terl-podcast/feed/2Evaluating The Redskins Offensive Line With The Ringer’s Robert Mayshttp://misterirrelevant.com/redskins-offensive-line-podcast-robert-mays/
http://misterirrelevant.com/redskins-offensive-line-podcast-robert-mays/#respondFri, 11 Aug 2017 17:40:10 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39234Well, this was fun. Robert Mays (currently of The Ringer, formerly of Grantland) stopped by the Mr. I Pod to discuss the Hogs 2.0.

His take? “They’re a good group.”

Trent Williams is one of the NFL’s best left tackles, of course, and Morgan Moses is a solid bookend. Brandon Scherff is good. Shawn Lauvao and Spencer Long are fine, or so says Mays.

Overall, he’d ranks them as one of the top “eight to 10” offensive lines in the league. Not bad!

He also confirmed that the original Hogs are one of the greatest lines of all time, and I may or may not have bullied him into saying they were No. 1 overall. Nice guy, Mays.

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/redskins-offensive-line-podcast-robert-mays/feed/02017 Redskins Projection Over/Unders With Matt Terlhttp://misterirrelevant.com/2017-redskins-projection-overunders-with-matt-terl/
http://misterirrelevant.com/2017-redskins-projection-overunders-with-matt-terl/#commentsThu, 10 Aug 2017 20:30:21 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39220A couple months back Chris posted ESPN’s player and team projections for the Redskins. He wrote about it then, and me and Matt Terl spent 24 minutes talking about it now (listen below).

A quick primer/cheat sheet, for those who don’t feel like listening closely to every word …

]]>http://misterirrelevant.com/2017-redskins-projection-overunders-with-matt-terl/feed/2Introducing The Mr. Irrelevant T-Shirt For Discerning D.C. Sports Fanshttp://misterirrelevant.com/mr-irrelevant-t-shirt-dc-crest-logo/
http://misterirrelevant.com/mr-irrelevant-t-shirt-dc-crest-logo/#respondThu, 10 Aug 2017 18:23:57 +0000http://misterirrelevant.com/?p=39213Mr. Irrelevant has collaborated on T-shirts in the past (Football Team! Offseason Champs! Mr. Walk-Off!), but this is the first one that’s inspired by the site itself and not some other D.C. sports ephemera.

The design is by Ben Markowitz, who created our D.C. flag-inspired logo, which I love. And it’s made by Sneekis, who are great guys that we’ve worked with before (KD2DC!).

We assure you this is a quality shirt, soft and comfy. I wear it myself in XL.

It also represents something meaningful to me. If you’re familiar with this site, then I don’t have to explain, but if you aren’t:

We’ve done this since 2004, my brother and friends and I. When it started I was in my mid-20s, not married, no kids and not much of a career. We didn’t have a dog or a mortgage. Now we’re on our second dog and we have a few mortgages. I’m turning 40, married with three kids and, well, the career part is still a little confounding.

But in and out of 13 years, through thousands of posts and tweets and over dozens of podcasts, Mr. Irrelevant is a sweet presence in my life, and hopefully the lives of others. (I’ve written about this before, if you want to get maudlin.)

So yeah, having this shirt out there means a lot to me, and to us. Just that you’re reading this is good enough, but seeing it out in the world would be great, too. We hope you like it.